ANAHEIM >> Some players crawl toward their milestones and touch them with fingertips stretched, like exhausted marathoners.

Albert Pujols made this one look like an errand.

With bases loaded against Minnesota’s Ervin Santana, who has been one of baseball’s best pitchers this year, Pujols took a tight, controlled swing in the fourth inning Saturday and followed through with full extension.

It helped that Santana’s 87 mph slider hovered at the equator of the plate, but the top hitters leave no mistake unpunished. It was like most home runs, a fly ball that never quite came down, and Pujols looked at it stonily before taking the 600th trot of his career.

When he crossed the plate, he did his usual double-point to the sky and clapped his hands, but now he was hugged by Ben Revere, with Eric Young Jr. and Kole Calhoun waiting. They were all on base for Pujols, who became the first to make his 600th a grand slam.

A 23-year-old graphic designer from Costa Mesa named Scotty Steffel caught it. Fittingly, he is not just a collectibles hunter. He is a longtime Angels fan who was here for the 2002 championship and couldn’t begin to estimate how many Angels games he’s seen. The rest of the 40,236 gave Pujols a proper salute.

At some point those fans will realize, numbly, that this might have been the final Kodak moment of the 2017 season.

But only eight other crowds in MLB history have seen a 600th home run.

“I’ve never worried about the numbers,” said Pujols, as his son Ezra played with the cap of Pujols’ action figure. “I just come here to be part of my second family, my teammates, and do everything I can to help them win.”

His wife Deidre texted him during the game, which, since Pujols was the DH, provided ample down time. She told him to stay back and look for his pitch. “I guess I finally listened to her,” he said.

He had already gotten texts from former batting coaches Don Baylor, Mitchell Page and Garrett Stephenson. Mark McGwire had congratulated him, too. Although his postgame news conference didn’t start until 11 p.m., he was joined by teammates Mike Trout, Garrett Richards and Calhoun. They seemed to grasp the gravity better than most people do. Miguel Cabrera is the next closest to 600 and he is 149 away.

The Angels will pay Pujols for four more seasons, so there was nothing final about this. He is 124 hits from 3,000. Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds didn’t go 600-3,000. Only Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Alex Rodriguez have.

And the slam gave Pujols 42 RBIs for the season, one off the American League lead.

Home runs got so cheap there for a while that people lost proportion of what 600 means. Pujols has gotten there even though he never has hit 50 in a season and led the National League only twice.

The fact is that Pujols is not a home run hitter. He is a great hitter who hits home runs. His lifetime batting average is .309, and that includes precious few leg hits. If Pujols ends his career with a .300-plus lifetime average, he will join Mays, Ruth and Aaron as the only players to combine that with 600 home runs. You could certainly make the argument that Mays, Ruth and Aaron are the best players who ever lived.

The other factor is that home runs aren’t that prevalent anymore. Yes, PED testing has something to do with that, but so does lack of expansion. Pitching is simply deeper and better. Last year only eight players hit 40 or more home runs. In 2014 only one player (Nelson Cruz) hit 40.

Pujols has 600 home runs in a time when only eight active players have 300 or more. And while he’s first in home runs among actives, he is only 29th in striking out. Put another way, he has more than twice as many plate appearances as Baltimore’s Chris Davis and has struck out 301 fewer times. Pujols has 38 strikeouts this season, which is high for him, but the Milwaukee Brewers struck out 26 times Friday night alone. The game has changed more than he has.

Pujols also leads active players in runs, doubles, walks, intentional walks and slugging percentage and is seventh in batting average. He is third in hits behind Ichiro Suzuki and Adrian Beltre and is younger than both.

This is Year 6 of Pujols’ 10-year, $240 million contract, the one that made all of baseball gasp in December of 2011. True, the Angels still have to pay him $114 million after this year. But many people thought Pujols would be a walking memory by now. Instead, he was third in the league in RBIs last season.

“You don’t see 600 every night,” Pujols said, which sounds superfluous but was actually significant. You don’t often see a 600th homer look like an everyday task … as if you often see a 600th homer anyway. But tomorrow brings another laundry list.

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